About C-HIGHER
Welcome to the Center for Historical Games and Heritage (C-HIGHER), founded at the University of Gdansk, Poland, in 2025. As an interdepartmental research and innovation team led by the Faculty of History, C-HIGHER explores the intersection of history, heritage, and games. We aim to inspire educational innovation, promote cultural understanding, and advance game development through research, teaching, partnerships, and creative projects. Our mission is to bridge academia, industry, and nonprofits to craft meaningful experiences for audiences, and impactful solutions for creative industries. We work in four areas – Research, Education, Gamedev, and Nonprofits – and forge synergies between them.
HISTORY HAS A FUTURE – AT C-HIGHER WE MAKE BOTH
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Faculty of History, University of Gdansk
OUR MISSION
The impact of historical games goes far beyond history. We explore every avenue where history- and heritage-themed games are created, deployed, critiqued, appropriated, and engaged with. Based at a public university, C-HIGHER is not a profit-driven business – our commitment is to create lasting value and to be a catalyst of positive change. As an interdisciplinary research and innovation centre, the scope of our work spans professional, hobbyist, cultural, and political contexts.
Heritage industry
Museums, heritage festivals, memory sites, and cultural tourism attractions compete for people’s time and attention in today’s engagement economy. Audiences of all ages now expect interactive, immersive experiences. Games meet this demand on multiple fronts: On-site, through gamified tours, location-based challenges, XR technology, tabletop gaming, and role-playing. Online, through virtual heritage tours and web-based games. Off-site, through analog and digital games that amplify an organisation’s (site/city/region’s) brand and public outreach.
🜙 Our Faculty’s network connects us with many heritage organisations in Poland and abroad, from the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk to the Polish Center of Discovery and Learning in the USA. Our undergraduate Historical Game Design curriculum includes a dedicated class on museum innovations.
Commercial game industries
There’s money to be had. So-called cultural games are increasingly supported by robust EU and national funding schemes. In the wake of the 2023+ crisis – which severely limited access to traditional investor funding – co-financing from grant programmes and public institutions can be a game-changer for small and mid-sized companies. Public funding helps studios stay afloat, ship new titles, and secure jobs.
🜙 At C-HIGHER, we collaborate with partners from both video game development and tabletop gaming on joint grant proposals to support the growth of cultural games.
NGOs and schools
History and heritage games are powerful tools for education, social integration, and civic empowerment. NGOs and schools use off-the-shelf games but also adapt them, redesign, and create new ones. These are often referred to as serious games, applied games, games for change, or games with a purpose. Historical games do more than recount the past – they foster intercultural dialogue, civic education, identity exploration, heritage preservation, decolonisation efforts, and more.
🜙 C-HIGHER collaborates on educational and cultural projects with partners such as the FRUG Foundation for the University of Gdansk, the Games Research Association of Poland, the Teatrikon Foundation, and the Topory Association.
Research and higher education
Beyond game-based learning for students, History departments co-create or fund games for external audiences – as public history, popular science, or even as a new form of historiography. Research centres also provide expert consultancy for creative industries. Historical and heritage-themed games draw on the expertise of historians, art historians, archaeologists, museologists, but also experts in classic languages, mythology, regional heritage, and more. Consultancy for creative industries is finding a place within university curricula.
🜙 C-HIGHER’s team includes historical game consultants and co-creators with experience in popular science game projects or commercial histgameconsulting. Our Faculty runs a BA programme in Historical Game Design, featuring both game design and historical consultancy.
Defence and resilience
A major sector of historical games, wargaming is used for training and simulation in the military, diplomacy, crisis response, and resilience planning at various governmental levels. Its integration into defence and intelligence education is now widely recognised, as evidenced by the recently launched Master’s program in Wargaming and Resilience Planning (Brunel University, UK). Games are also employed in safety and resilience education addressed to children in conflict-affected regions – for instance, in war-torn Ukraine.
🜙 C-HIGHER hosts an annual “Games of War” conference on games that address the 2014/2022+ Russo-Ukrainian war. Our staff includes experts in political science and defence studies with extensive professional and hobbyist experience in tabletop wargaming and role-playing.
Peace-gaming and peace education
While wargaming has long served defence education, peace-gaming is emerging as a complementary field. Its focus includes creating anti-war games for peace education, developing design methods that promote non-violent conflict resolution, and producing serious games and training scenarios for professionals involved in conflict prevention, mediation, and reconciliation.
🜙 C-HIGHER research staff participate in international initiatives focused on peace education through games. The principles of peace-gaming design are included in our Historical Game Design BA programme.
Counterpropaganda
History/heritage-themed games are powerful instruments of heritage-making and historical politics. Although they can be exploited for propaganda and misinformation by anti-democratic regimes, they can also serve as effective tools for counterpropaganda. Initiatives such as CTRL+ALT+DISINFO, sparked by the Global Game Jam in 2025, promote media literacy and critical thinking through game design. Historical games have a vital role in combating disinformation related to memory, heritage, and identity.
🜙 C-HIGHER works with partners in Poland and abroad to counter Russian war propaganda and manipulative historical narratives. We do this through the “Games of War” conference, the CTRL+ALT+DISINFO game jam theme, and historical tabletop RPG co-developed transnationally by authors from Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.
Intersectoral collaboration
Each of these sectors – gamedev, heritage, education, research, defence, and civil society – stands as a distinct field of professional practice. Yet they can be powerfully connected through historical games. A good example is the Horizon-funded MEMENTOES consortium, which united museums, NGOs, gamedev, and research centres to create impactful serious games about traumatic histories.
🜙 At C-HIGHER, we group our activities into four key areas: research, education, gamedev, and nonprofits – each backed by dedicated infrastructures, specialised skill sets, and funding schemes. At the same time, there are extra incentives and funding programmes to foster cross-sector collaborations and partnerships. We aim to unite these diverse yet connected fields, maximising synergies for innovation, impact, and growth.
HISTORY HAS A FUTURE – AT C-HIGHER WE MAKE BOTH